The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

9.2. Determining Interactions

Creating a strategy for successfully implementing interactions involves an intricate balance between the resources, the organizing system that arranges and manages them, its producers, and its intended users or consumers. The design of interactions is driven by user requirements and their impact on the choices made in the implementation process. It is constrained by resource and technical system properties and by social and legal requirements. Determining the scope and scale of interactions requires a careful analysis of these individual factors, their combination, and the consequences thereof.

Stop and Think: Constraint vs Flexibility

Think of an information organization project you were involved in. Can you recall ways in which you were constrained in representing an idea by the organizational system the project was implemented with? In what ways was the project negatively affected by the implementation? In what ways might the constraint have had a positive effect?

It is useful to distinguish decisions that involve choices, where multiple feasible alternatives exist, from decisions that involve constraints, where design choices have been eliminated or rendered infeasible by previous ones. The goal when creating an organizing system is to make design decisions that preserve subsequent choices or that create constraints that impose design decisions that would have been preferred anyway.

9.2.1. User Requirements

Users (human or computational agents)